The Rite (37 page)

The king himself had been in the rearguard, and thus, since the company had reversed it facing, rode his white destrier in the vanguard. He brandished his sword, and a halo of light, somehow visible even in the bright sunshine, flowered around him. Will inferred that he’d used his paladin abilities to cast some useful enchantment. Damara’s champion then charged his foes, and his knights surged after him.

Will sighed. The Damarans actually had a chance.

The halfling sensed a presence on his left. As he pivoted, the grizzled sergeant bent over him, the better to shout into his face.

“Are you deaf?” the Damaran roared, spraying him with droplets of spit. “I said, move out!”

He strode away as soon as Will showed signs of obeying.

“I helped fetch your king’s soul out of Shadow,” Will said to the warrior’s broad, mail-clad back, meanwhile extracting a skiprock from his belt pouch. You really ought to treat me with more respect.”

Vingdavalac was a bronze dragon, though in the pale, steady light of Firefingers’s magical lamps, his scales looked more yellow than metal-brown. According to Rilitar, that was a sign of the dragon’s relative youth, and certainly, he was smaller than any of the warriors of the Queen’s Bronzes Taegan had known in Impiltur, compact enough to fit inside the magicians’ workroom without utterly dominating the space.

Taegan realized his mind was wandering and he made an effort to focus on the report Thentia’s magicians had assembled to hear. It was difficult. Vingdavalac had a rambling, pedantic, tedious way of speaking, the room was warm and stuffy, and Taegan’s head buzzed as if he had a bee trapped in his skull. He wondered if he was getting sick.

Then the droning resolved itself into words of command forgotten until that moment. He felt a stab of horror, which hardened into determination. At last he recalled how Sammaster’s agent had violated him, and if he was aware, then surely he could resist.

He opened his mouth to warn the wizards and plead for their help, but couldn’t force the words out. He sought to flail his arms and capture their attention, only to discover he couldn’t manage that, either. He struggled to flee the tower. His legs refused to walk, or his wings, to spread.

He felt defiance fading. He strained to hold onto it, but it dwindled anyway, until nothing remained and he no longer even understood why he’d made the effort. He had a task to perform, and perform it he would. Why wouldn’t he?

He murmured the opening phrases of the incantation under his breath. If no one heard, no one would try to stop him.

Or so he imagined. But then something, a duelist’s instinct for danger, perhaps, warned him of trouble on his left. Trying to make the motion appear casual, he looked around. Rilitar had been standing at his side, but at some point in the past few moments, had slipped away, placing some distance between them. The elf was whispering too, his lips moving rapidly, rushing to complete his spell first.

Sammaster’s ally had compelled both Taegan and Jivex into his service. Accordingly, the bladesinger pointed urgently at Rilitar. Jivex, who’d been flitting restlessly about the ceiling, dived at the elf, throat swelling with its disorienting euphoric vapor, talons poised. Taegan whipped out the magnificent sword the wizard had given him and rushed to aid the drake in his benefactor’s destruction. At the same time, he continued with his spell.

Jivex spat out a plume of his sparkling breath. Rilitar jumped away and covered his mouth and nose with the collar of his tunic. It evidently protected him, for he kept on chanting, declaiming the intricate rhymes at the top of his voice. No doubt he hoped it would alert his colleagues that something was amiss, and probably it did. But surprise froze them in place and rendered them useless.

Jivex clawed for Rilitar’s eyes. The magician wrenched himself to the side, and the reptile merely tore gashes in his cheek as he hurtled past. By then, however, Taegan was nearly in sword range. He sprang forward, beating his wings to lengthen the leap, and lunged.

Rilitar floundered backward, twisted, and the thrust plunged into his biceps instead of his torso. Taegan yanked the sword back and prepared to redouble. Both combatants were still reciting their spells. Magic whined in the air around them.

Taegan’s point plunged at Rilitar’s breast. The elf was off balance. He couldn’t dodge again.

But gloved hands seized hold of Taegan’s forearm and held his weapon back. The grip sent a magical jolt of pain juddering through his body, but couldn’t make him stumble over his words of power. He turned his head. It was Scattercloak who’d grabbed him. Even with their bodies scant inches apart, Taegan still couldn’t see even a hint of the features hidden inside the magician’s shadowy cowl.

He jerked his arm free of Scattercloak’s hold, then bashed the warlock in the jaw—presumably—with the pommel of his sword. Bone cracked. Scattercloak reeled backward and fell on his rump.

Taegan whirled back toward Rilitar. His instincts told him the elf presented the greater threat to the completion of his task, and therefore, he meant to finish him first. Wheeling, claws outstretched, Jivex began a second pass.

But before either attacker could strike, Rilitar shouted the final syllable of his spell. He lashed his hands apart, and power streamed from him in an invisible but palpable wave. Taegan staggered. Jivex floundered in flight.

That, however, was merely an incidental effect of the spell. The true purpose was evidently to cleanse the mind of possession, and that it accomplished. Taegan was himself again, full of gratitude for his liberation and a profound desire to exact retribution on the dastard who’d enslaved him.

When his psychic shackles broke, a portion of his memories withered, for that was the way of his adversary. The wretch sought to plan for every contingency. To layer one safeguard on another. But he hadn’t done enough tampering. Taegan still knew where to aim his sword.

He pivoted, seeking his foe, then realized to his dismay that though Rilitar’s counterspell had freed Jivex as well, the faerie dragon hadn’t figured out what he had. As a result, the reptile was streaking across the chamber at pudgy, white-robed Darvin Kordeion.

“No!” Taegan cried. He spread his pinions, leaped into the air, and flew toward his comrade. “Darvin’s not the traitor. You’re attacking the wrong man!”

For a moment, it looked as if Jivex was too enraged to hear. Then, however, the drake veered off, an instant before he would otherwise have ripped the mage with his talons. Darvin stumbled backward, his eyes wide with shock.

Taegan wrenched himself around to find the real foe, then saw with a twinge of dread that the need to save Darvin had delayed him too long. It had given Phourkyn One-eye time to cast a spell.

The square-built mage with his eye patch and shiny, slicked-back hair thrust out his hand. A spark leaped from his fingers and shot across the workroom, to strike in the center of the majority of the assembled wizards, Vingdavalac, and a goodly assortment of their notes, books, and documents.

With a deafening boom, the point of light exploded into a spherical blast of fire. The flame didn’t blaze out far enough to engulf Taegan, but the concussion tumbled him through the air and slammed him into a wall. He dropped to the floor.

Refusing to let the shock of the impact paralyze him, he struggled to his feet. On the far side of the room, some of the wizards and even Vingdavaiac sprawled motionless. Taegan prayed they were simply stunned, not dead. Other mages threw themselves to the floor and rolled to extinguish their burning robes. Hissing tongues of flame danced on books and papers. Perhaps immune to the searing heat that made the bladesinger flinch from yards away, old Firefingers stood conjuring and seemingly unharmed in the midst of the conflagration.

His platinum wings a blur, Jivex swooped down to hover in front of Taegan’s face.

“They just can’t keep this place from catching on fire,” the reptile said.

“But maybe Firefingers can extinguish the blaze as he did before,” Taegan said, “if we stop Phourkyn from making any more mischief.”

He cast about, spotted the treacherous mage, and flew at him. In so doing, he met the gaze of Phourkyn’s single eye.

Bitter sorrow welled up inside Taegan, drowning his anger and determination, making him falter short of his objective. For a moment, the emotion, though intense, was formless, unconnected to rational thought or memory. Then he recalled his mother, father, and the other kindred and friends he’d left behind in the Earthwood. He hadn’t even bade them farewell before forsaking the clan. He’d feared it would be too painful, feared they might even talk him out of his resolve, but how the callous abandonment must have hurt them!

These feelings aren’t real, he insisted to himself. Phourkyn’s playing with my mind. He struggled against the grief and regret, denying them, and after a second, pushed them back. They still oppressed his spirit like a heavy chain, but at least they weren’t paralyzing him anymore.

He oriented on Phourkyn once again, just in time to see one of the long worktables squirm like an animal working the stiffness out of its muscles. Flexible as a serpent, spilling the tomes and sheets of parchment heaped on top of it, the table reared up on two legs with the obvious intention of smashing down on the mage. Evidently Jivex had animated it with his supernatural abilities, for he hovered, staring at it, apparently guiding it by sheer force of will.

Unfortunately, Phourkyn invoked magic of his own, and vanished. The living table crashed down on an empty patch of floor. Jivex hissed in frustration.

It was conceivable that Phourkyn’s wizardry had carried him a thousand miles away. But Taegan didn’t think so. Now that he’d unmasked Sammaster’s minion, the time for stealthy murder and patient manipulation was over. If Phourkyn wanted to be sure of putting an end to the wizards’ investigations, he had to finish the job. Such being the case, he was probably lurking right outside the tower, conceivably poised to strike at whoever exited through the door.

Fresh sadness welled up inside Taegan, stinging his eyes with tears, swelling a lump in his throat.

He snarled to quell the magically induced emotion, then called, “Come here!”

While Jivex flew to him, he murmured words of power and brandished his scrap of licorice root. His muscles jumped, and the dragon snarled, as the magic seethed through them, quickening their reactions.

“Take hold of mc,” Taegan continued.

He stretched out his arm, and Jivex gripped it with his foreclaws. Straining a little to support the reptile’s weight, the bladesinger rattled off a second spell.

The world seemed to wink like an eye—and they were high above Firefingers’s red-and-yellow tower. The open air felt cool and clean after the heat and smoke inside. Taegan beat his wings and studied the streets and rooftops below. Jivex released his arm and flitted back and forth, peering downward also.

“There!” cried the faerie dragon, his hide rippling with rainbows in the sunlight. “I see him!” He pointed by jabbing his snout in the proper direction.

“Right,” said Taegan grimly.

Sword extended before him, conjuring a defensive charm, he dived. Jivex streaked after him. Below them, just outside the gateway to the spire’s courtyard, stood Phourkyn. The traitorous mage began to change, to grow into something colossal. Yellow scales sprouted over his body, his ears lengthened, and his face stretched into fanged jaws. A golden eye burned on each side of his reptilian mask.

Phourkyn dropped to all fours, then each of his legs divided into two. Batlike wings erupted from his shoulders, and a serpentine tail writhed forth from the base of his spine. At the tip of the appendage throbbed a point of light.

As the magician swelled and altered, his form grew brighter and brighter, until Taegan had to squint to look at him. The air wavered around him, twisted by the creature’s bourgeoning internal heat.

People screamed and fled. Taegan started to veer off. He’d read of dragons like that in a book from Rilitar’s library. The creature was called a sunwyrm, was hideously powerful, and it probably didn’t matter a mouse’s whisker whether Phourkyn was truly a drake who’d spent years disguised as a human or was a human cloaking himself in the form of a drake. As powerful was his wizardry was, he was almost certainly capable of using all of a sunwyrm’s devastating capabilities either way.

Taegan could never defeat such a terrible foe. It was hopeless. No, curse it, it wasn’t! It was only Phourkyn’s spell making him feel that it was. He and Jivex had killed a dracolich, and they could slay a sunwyrm as well.

Particularly if they struck before the dastard’s transformation was complete. Until then, he might be vulnerable. Accordingly, intent on thrusting his sword deep into Phourkyn’s heart, Taegan drove at his enemy with every iota of speed he could muster.

He’d almost reached the target when, wings buzzing, halo of flame crackling, the chasme sprang from Phourkyn’s chest.

as easily as an earthly creature could pounce from a patch of fog. The fly-thing’s claws were poised to rend, its long, pointed chitinous snout, to stab, and Taegan’s own momentum hurled him onward into the attacks.

To Dorn, in his impatience, it felt rather like a maddeningly slow and stately dance.

Soaring above the mountains, valleys, and glacier, the metals and chromatics had maneuvered and countermaneuvered for an hour, each host seeking to attain the high air, to put the chilly wind at its back, or to outflank its foe. Occasionally one dragon or another conjured a bank of fog, a floating mass of darkness, or a veil of invisibility to disguise its movements, and sometimes a spellcaster on the other side exerted himself to wipe such obscurements away. So far, though, no one had thrown a genuine attack spell.

Nor had Kara commenced one of her ringing battle anthems. Instead, she crooned a gentle ballad. He supposed it kept her relaxed, or helped her think.

For his part, he found himself incapable of relaxation, and at the moment had nothing useful to think about. He just wished the cursed wyrms would get on with it.